March 19 Fallas de San José

Las Falla Infintile for the
Carmen District

Scarred from the events of the previous night, I avoided most contact with the world outside of my apartment for the majority of the day. The last mascleta happened today, but I was not going to fight through crowds of people, in the rain, to hear the booms that I could easily hear from my apartment. I did not feel bad, because some tried to make me feel bad about it, because I have been to enough, it's not like I had never been. I really just hate the noise, and the crowds of people gathering around got larger and larger as the week went on.

I went to dinner at "Acai Bowl," which isn't the actual name of the place, but it's what we call it, with Jacqueline and Brittany. Then we got dessert at San Tommaso, even though they sadly ran out of what we actually wanted. Then we came back to get ready for the burnings.

The children's structures, the smaller ones, were burned first between 10 and 11. The 'bombers' (firefighters, an awful name, isn't it?) have to be present at all burnings, so not all 200+ can burn at once. Ours went off around 10:30 and the firefighters were hosing down the trees with water, the poor things. We discovered, though, that before each burning, fireworks are shot off, for about a minute beforehand, to let everyone know that a burning is taking place. Fireworks were going off every few minutes and when we were walking towards the city center we could see several and we knew that something was going up in flames.

We stood in one spot for 2 hours waiting for the burning of the main Falla. We were basically 10 rows back, from the closest they'd allow us to be. It was a great spot and the conversations/arguments we had going for that hour were brilliant. The fireworks that went off before the main Falla, at 1am, were freaking crazy. They were 10x louder than normal, and a few went off that didn't shoot upward, but just sounded like a bomb going off. It shook the ground, and as one of my friends said before, "it shook my soul," they were terrifying. The blinding lights of the certain fireworks are terrible, but the sound is just, eughhh. The sound also echos and bounces from the buildings, so you can still hear them going off minutes after they've actually stopped.



The burning itself was pretty neat too. At first is seemed like nothing really caught on fire, but then something happened and it was gone. The person was made entirely of wood, so it burned super quick. We could feel the heat and we were probably 200 yards away from it. The Valencian anthem was played/sung, as it was at every burning, and people cheered as everything began to crumble.

The remnants of  Falla